Provision Of Local Authority Housing

EDM number 332 in 2009-10, proposed by Austin Mitchell on 02/12/2009.
Categorised under the topics of Housing supply and Social rented housing.

That this House welcomes the new direct investment in existing and new council housing but considers that the level of funding in the proposed Housing Revenue Account reforms is not sufficient to meet housing need; believes that the 3,200 new council homes will be nowhere near enough to provide the public housing for rent needed by the five million people on council housing waiting lists and that the new homes built will be heavily outnumbered by council homes lost through privatisation and sales to finance decent homes improvement in the year ahead; and recommends that to avoid further loss of much-needed local authority housing stock the Government should impose an immediate moratorium on the further sale of council housing, should provide funding on the scale necessary to meet the level of need including the £7 billion backlog of capital works, and should provide a new system of funding council housing which creates a level playing field on debt write-off and stock transfer so as to achieve the `sustainable, long-term system for financing council housing' promised by Ministers, and to begin the big council and social house-building drive necessary to put people and builders back to work and ensure that the building of public housing reaches the level necessary to check the rise in private house prices and prevent people being forced to take up mortgages they cannot afford as the only way of being housed, trends which have led to the present crisis.

This motion has been signed by a total of 64 MPs, 1 of these signatures have been withdrawn.